Conventional clothes dryers utilize warmed air to facilitate the drying of a load of clothes. Recently, a newer technology, exemplified by the above-cited PCT patent application and issued U.S. patent, has appeared on the horizon, in which items to be dried are subjected to a capacitive AC electrical field generated by an RF power source (RF technology).
Other examples of this new RF technology are further described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,826,561 B2 issued Sep. 9, 2014, entitled “High Efficiency Heat Generator”; U.S. Pat. No. 8,943,705 B2 issued Feb. 3, 2015, entitled “Dielectric Dryer Drum”; U.S. Pat. No. 9,173,253 B2 issued Oct. 27, 2015, entitled “Ionic Adder Dryer Technology”; and U.S. Pat. No. 9,447,537 B2 issued Sep. 20, 2016, entitled “Fixed Radial Anode Drum Dryer”; all four of these issued U.S. patents are also hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties into the present patent application.
The instant patent application describes novel and non-obvious techniques for advantageously combining the older and the newer drying technologies.